262 research outputs found
Individual variations in learners’ ability to use connectives in a foreign language
No full textConnectives are linguistic items that indicate discourse relations like cause and condition between discourse segments and thus represent crucial elements for coherence (Halliday and Hasan, 1976; Sanders, Spooren, & Noordman, 1992). Despite their high frequency in most discourse genres, the ability to handle connectives typical of the written mode has been found to be quite variable even among adult native speakers (Zufferey & Gygax, 2020), and this variability has been linked to the degree of exposure to print that people have.
In this presentation, we investigate the ability of German-speaking learners of French to use 12 French connectives typical of the written mode. We also investigate the role of three variables that could account for the variability between learners: language proficiency; exposure to print in the second language (French) and exposure to print in the first language (German). In a sentence completion task performed online, we tested 151 German-speaking learners of French as well as a control group of 63 French native speakers. In order to assess learners’ proficiency level in written French, we gave them a written language competence task (Zufferey and Gygax, 2020) and a vocabulary knowledge-test (Lextale, Brysbaert, 2013). In addition, we tested the exposition to print in both their L1 (Art-Ger, Grolig, Tiffin-Richards & Schroeder, 2020) and L2 (Art-F, Zufferey and Gygax, 2020). Finally, in a self-assessment task, we measured learners’ perceived importance of 10 given factors (e.g. school, friends, reading, Internet) for their acquisition of French.
Results indicate that for the non-native speakers, a higher vocabulary knowledge and a better grammar mastery predicted a better score in the main task. More intriguingly, a higher exposition to print in L1, but not in L2, also predicted a better mastery of connectives in L2. These results thus tend to indicate that L2 acquisition research should focus more on the first language competence of the participants as predictors of their ability to use connectives, as results show that there are several factors that facilitate or hinder learners’ mastery that are linked to their native language. These factors raise important questions about a possible interaction between the native and foreign languages (see also Sparks, Patton, Ganschow, Humbach, & Javorsky, 2006; Sparks, Patton, Ganschow, & Humbach, 2012). Finally, participants that assigned a higher importance to the factor reading for their acquisition of French were more likely to score higher at the main task. Beside supporting our finding of the link between connective mastery and the exposition to print, this finding shows that subjective impressions of participants are reliable predictors of their level of competence
Datasets
No full textGygax, P., Thomas, C., Didierjean, A., and Kuhn, G. (2019). Are women perceived as worse magicians than men? Gender bias when evaluating magic tricks. Social Psychological Bulleti
Datasets
No full textGygax, P., Thomas, C., Didierjean, A., and Kuhn, G. (2019). Are women perceived as worse magicians than men? Gender bias when evaluating magic tricks. Social Psychological Bulleti
Datasets
No full textGygax, P., Thomas, C., Didierjean, A., and Kuhn, G. (2019). Are women perceived as worse magicians than men? Gender bias when evaluating magic tricks. Social Psychological Bulleti
Can language amendments change gender representation? The case of Norway.
No full textThis study investigates the influence of stereotypical information and the grammatical masculine on the representation of gender in Norwegian by applying a sentence evaluation paradigm. In this study, as in Gygax et al. (2007), participants had to decide whether a second sentence containing explicit information about the gender of one of more of the characters (e.g. …one of the women…) was a sensible continuation of a first sentence introducing a role name (e.g. The spies came out…). Participants’ representations were biased by the stereotypicality of the role names when reading female (e.g. nurses) and male (e.g. pilots) stereotyped role names (replicating findings from the English sample of Gygax et al.), but male biased when reading neutral role names (replicating findings from the French and the German samples of Gygax et al.)
QJE-STD-18-122.R2-Supplementary_Materials – Supplemental material for Back to the future? The role of temporal focus for mapping time onto space
No full textSupplemental material, QJE-STD-18-122.R2-Supplementary_Materials for Back to the future? The role of temporal focus for mapping time onto space by Emanuel Bylund, Pascal Gygax, Steven Samuel and Panos Athanasopoulos in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology</p
Can a group of musicians becomposed of women? Generic interpretation of French masculine rolenames in absence and presence of feminine forms.
No full textThis study investigates the influence of stereotypical information and the grammatical masculine on the representation of gender in Norwegian by applying a sentence evaluation paradigm. In this study, as in Gygax et al. (2007), participants had to decide whether a second sentence containing explicit information about the gender of one of more of the characters (e.g. …one of the women…) was a sensible continuation of a first sentence introducing a role name (e.g. The spies came out…). Participants’ representations were biased by the stereotypicality of the role names when reading female (e.g. nurses) and male (e.g. pilots) stereotyped role names (replicating findings from the English sample of Gygax et al.), but male biased when reading neutral role names (replicating findings from the French and the German samples of Gygax et al.)
FBI déclassifié: Gygax paraît comme un dur à cuir
No full textVia PaxSims and ReasonH&R Le journaliste judiciaire CJ Ciaramella a fait une demande au FBI à propos de TSR, Inc. grâce au Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Le wargamer typique y est décrit comme extrêmement intelligent, vivant frugalement pour financer sa passion, en surpoids et négligé. Gary Gygax y est décrit comme excentrique et effrayant, portant une arme à feu, fier de répondre à des lettres de prisonniers, ayant une compagnie au Liberia pour échapper à l'impôt, membre du parti li..
Individual differences and emotional inferences during reading comprehension
No full textThis paper investigated readers’ representations of the main protagonist’s emotional status in short narratives, as well as several mental factors that may affect these representations. General and visuo-spatial working memory, empathy and simulation were investigated as potential individual differences in generating emotional inferences. Participants were confronted with narratives conveying information about the protagonist’s emotional state. We manipulated each narrative’s target sentence according to its content (emotional label vs. description of the behavior associated to the emotion) and to its congruence to the story (matching vs. mismatching). The results showed that globally the difference between reading times of congruent and incongruent target sentences was bigger in the behavioral than in the emotional condition. This pattern was accentuated for high visuo-spatial working memory participants when they were asked to simulate the stories. These results support the idea that mental models may be of a perceptual nature and may more likely include behavioral elements than emotion labels per se, as suggested earlier by Gygax et al. (2007)
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